They’ll be fine with significantly longer dev cycles. The question is, can they stop their greed and do that knowing they can sell millions with every annual release.

Gamefreak is expanding, and if they start taking a bit more time with their games like they seemingly have done with Legends Z-A, maybe the quality will start picking up a bit from previously.

If the graphics are only "ok" at 30fps on the next-gen system I'd still say that's somewhat incompetent.

I don't have faith in gamefreak to deliver technically, somehow they got worse on the Switch with more experience, but I hope to be proven wrong.

They should just go old-school 2D and make something that could be the sequel to Red/Blue/Yellow.

They already did, back in 1999.

They are called Pokémon Gold and Pokémon Silver.

Then do it again? I feel like Pokemon is similar to Sonic or Streets of Rage etc. Some franchises work well in all styles (Mario, Zelda) and some seem more suited to one particular style and should stay there. Pokemon feels like that sort of franchise to me.

I'm not ready to put Pokemon in that boat just yet, but I think you're onto something with Pokemon not being stuck to one style like Mario and Zelda. Imagine if GameFreak expanded and had multiple teams, like one full of more youthful devs that are more versed in modern engines and technology that could be given the appropriate time needed to make mainline games on current hardware that fans and critics would find acceptable from a graphical and technical standpoint. And the oldheads can make 2D or even sprite-based games in the same generation that still have mainline gameplay but could have an entirely different story, a story within the same general plot but from a different character, or the exact same story but just with a different art style and one less dimension.

It'd be cool if each gen they did one old school style 2D pokemon, one new gen 3D AAA pokemon (maybe hire a totally new team for that since the current devs/artists clearly aren't cutting it), and then one spinoff game (like Legends) where they experiment a bit to see what could be good to add in the following poke gen. Enough with the remakes and short dev cycles and almost annual releases, all that garbage needs to go out the window.

I think it will.

People will be overly critical about how it looks, but it'll actually look good. ZA looks good already, and we haven't seen any performance issues in the first trailer.

Pokemon got really bad PR for SV, and they are coming after a large backlash from SS. They publicly apologized for it. They saw the response to Palworld too, and it will be 4 years at least between gen 9 and 10.

I think people aren't being realistic about their expectations. GF don't historically make badly performing games. This isn't the norm for them. I think they're embarrassed about this, and have taken steps to prevent these issues in the future. ZA will run well. Maybe even 60fps on Switch 2. It already looks really good, and so does Champions.